


Out of the Bag

by this_amaranthine_heart



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, can i offer you a tiny hit of crack in these trying times?, crookshanks picked hermione as his owner because like him she actually has braincells, so let's let crookshanks use his said braincells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:39:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29113170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/this_amaranthine_heart/pseuds/this_amaranthine_heart
Summary: In his Animagus form, Sirius relays everything he knows about Scabbers to Crookshanks in order to enlist his help. He expects the cat to then help capture the rat and bring him to Sirius. Crookshanks does otherwise.
Kudos: 9





	Out of the Bag

Crookshanks trotted down the hall with his head and fluffy tail both held high—he was on a mission, and he was not about to be deterred. It had taken him three evenings of carefully, continuously watching the entrance door to the dormitory common room open and close too quickly for him to dart out in time without his bushy-haired owner noticing. Tonight, however, she had been in the middle of lecturing her two companions, the speckled and spectacled ones, on the sad state of their Charms essays and so Crookshanks had sauntered out of the room without her even glancing in his direction.

Crookshanks twitched his whiskers distastefully when he noticed the scent of the caretaker’s cat in the air—she was unpleasant to interact with, and nosy to boot, which wouldn’t suit his purposes this evening—but she didn’t appear around any corners as he trotted down the stairs and towards the section of the castle that held the professors’ suites. He headed quickly towards the rooms at the farthest end of the hall; in the month since he had begun living in the castle, he had devoted extensive hours to mapping out every place that might prove useful, and indeed his newfound knowledge was already coming to bear. Then he sat down, wrapped his tail imperiously around his front paws, and mewed.

Though no sounds came from inside in response, Crookshanks could smell that his intended audience was indeed inside. He had specifically timed his appearance knowing that he needed to catch her alone, and now that he was here he intended to follow through on his mission. Raising one paw, he scratched at the doorframe and yowled.

The door flung open at this and he tilted his head back to look up at the woman standing before him. Her eyes snapped down to meet his and then back up to scan the hallway, looking around for anyone besides him. After a few moments, she looked back at him with narrowed eyes.

“What are you doing here? Is something the matter with Ms. Granger?” She stepped out into the hallway, wrapping her tartaned dressing gown more firmly around herself as she strode past him, heading away from her rooms.

Crookshanks tilted his head slightly to the right for a moment, disappointed with a human he’d thought was relatively intelligent, and then hissed after her retreating form. When she stopped and turned to look back at him with sharp eyes, he twitched his tail pointedly but refused to move from his spot.  
They remained in that tableau for several heartbeats before her mouth primmed and she blew air out her nose, even as a light appeared in her eyes. “…I see.”

She stepped towards him once, glared down her nose at him, and then said, “You know, I do not enjoy being the arbiter of every petty issue a student’s cat faces in this building.”

Crookshanks regarded that with interest for a moment—there were others who had come to her in the past?—before fixing his eyes unblinkingly on her as the cat-shifter earned her name and shrunk down to meet him face-to-face.

And then he proceeded to calmly relay to her—repeating himself when necessary, for her shock and disbelief were extreme—every bit of the information and evidence that the dog-shifter had conveyed and that Crookshanks himself had noticed regarding the rat-shifter who had been living right under the noses of the castle’s inhabitants for years.

\--

Thirty minutes after Crookshanks had excused himself for a walk and only two minutes after Hermione had panickedly noticed that he was no longer anywhere to be found, Professor McGonagall flung open the door to Gryffindor Tower and demanded tersely without any elaboration that Mr. Ronald Weasley present to her his pet. Confused and terrified, he did so—the rat squealing and wriggling wildly in his fingers—at which point the professor proceeded to wave her wand in a complicated pattern and transfigure the rat into a naked man right there in their common room before no less than forty pairs of shocked eyes.

Three days later, the Ministry of Magic issued a formal apology to known mass murderer Sirius Black, who was possibly less of a mass murderer than they’d been purporting him to be.

Two weeks after that, the students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry celebrated a delightful but entirely unremarkable Halloween. After the dinner, two cats—one a half-Kneazle with a smushed face, the other a tabby with rectangular marks around its eyes like spectacles—discreetly escorted a large black dog into the castle to meet with first a green-eyed boy and then a scarred professor, neither of whom the dog had seen in twelve years.

The cats then settled down for what was rapidly becoming a weekly tête-à-tête on the latest suspicious goings-on in the castle as well as the subsequent rule-breaking these goings-on provoked from well-intentioned but foolish Gryffindor preteens who really ought to instead be bringing their concerns to adults to handle.

The year would go down, at least in the eyes of history and those not in the know, as one of the quietest in the entire thousand-year existence of the school. The two cats would agree that this was the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr as wherethereareoctobers! I'm challenging myself to actually post some piece of writing every month of 2021, so I have no idea what I'll be producing but stay tuned if you like!


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